John Phillips: Adventures on 10 Wheels

I'm flabbergasted that any American with sufficient cash can rent either a chain saw or a 12,600-pound truck.

August 2012
By
JOHN PHILLIPS
Photos By
GETTY IMAGES

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Last month, my wife and I moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, planetary headquarters for Car and Driver, to Darby, Montana, planetary headquarters for “Logger Days,” featuring a V-8–powered chain saw that backfires and blasts flames out of open headers, causing dogs to take cover behind the Cenex station. In Darby, I’m right now minus internet and TV—two Bitterroot Mountain–living drawbacks that the locals claim they can cure but not in what they describe as an “immediate time frame.” I miss watching Formula 1 and sports-car racing. On the other hand, 1000 feet of my front yard border National Forest Service land, where I’m entertained by four immature bull elk, two wild turkeys, and a red-tailed hawk that could hoist my cat, and might. My mailbox is 1.7 miles from my front door. A prominent sign on my access road warns, “Chains and 4WD may be necessary.” Notice the Montanan understatement in that: “may be.”

I moved here Beverly Hillbillies style, in a 35-foot-long rented box van towing a 17-foot tandem-axle trailer, with my wife driving our Toyota RAV4 in my weak wake. For the most part, I could maintain 60 mph on I-90 in South Dakota and Wyoming, but it induced the sort of stomach knots that I recall the night before taking the SAT. The distance was 2000 miles—four days of never-let-go steering nervousness and minor intestinal cramping, with me in putative command of a 2005 GMC Topkick C5500 with an 8.1-liter Vortec V-8 operating through a 5.13:1 final drive. None of which will matter to you, but it caused me to fixate on holding the transmission in fourth instead of third, third being the brute’s delinquent preference for undertaking even the puniest accelerative events, as might be required, for instance, after striking insects. Also, third gear buzzed the revs to four grand, which not only choked fuel economy to 6 mpg but also precluded use of the one-speaker radio—in fact, I had already donned earplugs—and it additionally elicited from the 100,000-mile V-8 the alarming sound of, well, Petoskey stones in a Cuisinart is what came to mind. In fairness, the truck never broke. A steady friend. But I talked to it a lot, congratulating it at each day’s end, using the tone you’d employ to soothe a sick pet.

The 52-foot-long rig reminded me of the summer I towed my friend Bill Adam’s Corvette to Trans-Am races all over the Midwest and Canada. On such endless, interstate horizon-shots, there sometimes descends an existential peace through forced patience that is the strangely soothing residue of unavoidable dilatory speeds—you can pass only overloaded 18-wheelers, no cars—as well as an unnerving camaraderie with truckers, a group on whom I’ve more regularly expended the sort of profanity that doughboys evoked during trench warfare.

I must say I’m flabbergasted that any American with sufficient cash in his trousers is allowed to rent—apparently with the consent of this country’s enthusiastic litigators—either a chain saw or a 12,600-pound truck capable of carrying 7400 pounds of car magazines and La-Z-Boys and, further, to attach to that already thundering payload of road-borne missiles a 1920-pound trailer stuffed with a bonus 2480 pounds of cat-mauled Broyhill sofas. At what point in my career did I qualify to shepherd 12-and-one-fifth tons of potentially lethal dorm furniture through Chicago at rush hour? A big sticker on the truck’s dash said, “Anticipate your braking.” It should have said, “Anticipate your crashing.”

What was maybe worse than crashing was every 57-gallon fuel stop, by which I mean the very real and positively toe-curling likelihood of having to back up. My wife would help direct, but she was of limited use. For one thing, I couldn’t see more than maybe 10 square inches of the trailer until it fully pretzeled into a cockeyed and seized L-shape behind me—all the while attempting to snap safety chains that would no doubt blast some poor innocent child’s eyeball into an adjacent county. So I bought two C-clamps at a Shell station and attached blue Dixie cups to the fenders—locator beacons. One was torn off by a chain-link fence that someone apparently erected while I visited a bathroom in Billings. That left me so unnerved that I immediately backed into a concrete light stanchion. Well, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t look. I just drove away. My wife told me later. Evidently, an alarmed onlooker brandished an index finger and shouted an unpleasant vulgarity that my wife had never heard before. I missed that, too.

When I dropped off the rig in Hamilton, Montana, I said to it, “Had your little fun with me, didn’t you?” Meanwhile, my wife wandered across North 1st Street to Jerry Wessel’s tire shop, where she was studying a set of 18-inch M+S tires so aggressive that they might have been developed on the Siberian Road of Bones. This was June 4. She had on her face a hungry look of desire that I’ve seen before, although only at the suit rack in Ann Taylor’s at Twelve Oaks Mall. So, maybe this adventure will work out after all.

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